21 George Bernard Shaw Quotes on Politics

George Bernard Shaw quotes on politics

22. You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

24. Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

25. Political necessities sometimes turn out to be political mistakes.

28. Our natural dispositions may be good; but we have been badly brought up, and are full of anti-social personal ambitions and prejudices and snobberies. Had we not better teach our children to be better citizens than ourselves? We are not doing that at present. The Russians ARE. That is my last word. Think over it.

30. God help England if she had no Scots to think for her!

33. You in America should trust to that volcanic political instinct which I have divined in you.

71. A movement which is confined to philosophers and honest men can never exercise any real political influence: there are too few of them. Until a movement shows itself capable of spreading among brigands, it can never hope for a political majority.

77. ... for Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allows them to do.

86. What is his religion? An excuse for hating ME. What is his law? An excuse for hanging YOU. What is his morality? Gentility! an excuse for consuming without producing. What is his art? An excuse for gloating over pictures of slaughter. What are his politics? Either the worship of a despot because a despot can kill, or parliamentary cockfighting.

101. As to your Life Force, which you think irresistible, it is the most resistible thing in the world for a person of any character. But if you are naturally vulgar and credulous, as all reformers are, it will thrust you first into religion, where you will sprinkle water on babies to save their souls from me; then it will drive you from religion into science, where you will snatch the babies from the water sprinkling and inoculate them with disease to save them from catching it accidentally; then you will take to politics, where you will become the catspaw of corrupt functionaries and the henchman of ambitious humbugs; and the end will be despair and decrepitude, broken nerve and shattered hopes, vain regrets for that worst and silliest of wastes and sacrifices, the waste and sacrifice of the power of enjoyment: in a word, the punishment of the fool who pursues the better before he has secured the good.

105. [between his teeth] Goon. Talk politics, you idiots: nothing sounds more respectable. Keep it up, I tell you.

112. Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.[1]

133. Kings are not born: they are made by universal hallucination.

144. A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. (Preface)

180. The nauseous sham goodfellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.

192. All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity.

200. A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.[1]

206. Democracy is a system ensuring that the people are governed no better than they deserve.

224. Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it:

225. Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.[1]

252. Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.